THIS WEEK YOU NEED TO KNOW
A LaRouche Idea Whose Time Has Come
On Wednesday, July 3, Lyndon LaRouche addressed a gathering of over 100 prominent elected officials, economists, Vatican representatives and civic leaders at the Sala Auditorium of the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Agneli, in Rome, Italy, on the subject of his longstanding proposal for the convening of a New Bretton Woods Conference, to put the present bankrupt world monetary and financial system through an orderly bankruptcy reorganization. The goal of such an effort by sovereign governments would be to create the preconditions for the launching of a global economic recovery, through the issuance of long-term, low-interest credits, earmarked for large-scale high-technology development projects, centered around LaRouche's proposal for the Eurasian Land-Bridge.
Among the leading Italian political figures who joined LaRouche were Dr. Nino Galloni, the director general of the Italian Labor Ministry; and Senator Oskar Peterlini, the author of an Italian Senate and Chamber of Deputies resolution, calling upon the Italian government to take the lead in convoking a conference of nation-states to establish a new global monetary system.
The Rome gathering, and the private meetings that occurred around it, were the most important events of the past week, coming in the context of a growing threat of financial collapse and war.
Over the past 60 days, Lyndon LaRouche has been a featured speaker at major policy conferences, and intensive private discussions, in the United Arab Emirates; in Sao Paulo, Brazil; in Switzerland; and Rome. It may fairly be said that Lyndon LaRouche is one of the most in-demand policy makers on the planet todayand for good reason.
The present world monetary system is finished. Signs of the death of the post-Bretton Woods System are everywhere, from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile in the Southern Cone of South America, where one country after another is facing sovereign default on long-unpayable debts; to Japan, where any honest accounting would judge that the entire commercial banking system is hopelessly bankrupt, and, indeed, drowning in non-performing debt; to Great Britain, where the rail system has been bankrupted by privatization and looting, and where a real estate bubble is expected to burst at any time that the Bank of England raises interest rates; to continental Europe, which is confronted with the immediate need to nationalize major sectors of the economy, from construction and entertainment (Germany) to telecommunications (Germany and France).
But the true epicenter of the global systemic crash is the United States, the so-called "last superpower standing" and "consumer of last resort" for the rest of the world. Last week, Executive Intelligence Review and Electronic Intelligence Weekly published a report by Richard Freeman and John Hoefle, presenting a stark picture of the U.S. debt.
Using the best available U.S. government data, EIR found that the total indebtedness of the United Statesincluding government debt at all levels, commercial debt, and household debtwas in the range of $32 trillion. The total U.S. Gross National Product was officially listed at $10 trillion. Of course, as the recent cases of Enron, Global Crossing, Xerox, WorldCom, ImClone, etc., suggest, a sizeable portion of the U.S. GNP is fake. While EIR had preliminarily estimated that the annual debt service on the $32-trillion in national debt was in the range of $5.7 trillion, consultations with economists at the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, and at a variety of financial research organizations, placed that figure at closer to $7.3 trillion! In other words, 73% of the entire U.S. GNP is going to debt service.
Under the conditions of a growing productive economy, it is not unreasonable to maintain a large debt. However, the U.S. economy is shrinking, and the manufacturing sector is shrinking at the greatest rate.
Put all of these elements together, add in the approximately $400 billion in annual trade deficit, consider the looming explosion of the U.S. real estate bubble, and it becomes clear: The United States, by any honest accounting standards, is bankrupt! The U.S. economy is the dead-man-walking of the world economy, and it is only a matter of timebrief timebefore some triggering event brings down the entire global financial and monetary system.
The 'Wall of Money' Revisited
Over the past week, two so-called "solutions" to this crisis have been put forward by leading figures within the Anglo-American financial establishment. At a recent conference in London, George Soros, in an obvious state of panic over Brazil's looming sovereign default, called for the world's central banks to throw another "wall of money" at the debt-strapped countries. Soros was referring to the policy adopted by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in October 1998, when, following the Russian GKO default and the collapse of the hedge fund LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management), the Fed launched a hyperinflationary printing-press operation, to reinflate the U.S. and global stock markets as a time-buying measure. Greenspan's "wall of money" policy, as LaRouche forecast all along, blew up, beginning in the spring of 2000, wiping out trillions of dollars in nominal stock and bond values, but simultaneously robbing the household and retirement savings of countless Americans.
The Washington Post's resident "Limp" ("Liberal Imperialist"), former London Economist bureau chief Sebastian Mallaby, seconded Soros's furtive plea, in a June 29 Washington Post op ed in which he warned that a failure to come through with a new round of International Monetary Fund bailouts for Argentina, Brazil, and other developing-sector nations would lead to radical measures. He was implicitly talking about LaRouche's New Bretton Woods call, as he specifically cited the 1982 actions by Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo, who, faced with an unpayable debt, nationalized the banking system, after a famous meeting with LaRouche, after which the American political economist issued his Operation Juarez plan for a global bankruptcy reorganization.
The 'New Hitler Project'
Anyone in their right mind knows that the Soros-Mallaby calls for a new hyperinflationary "wall of money" scheme would hardly last through the summer, before triggering an even bigger financial blowout. The real game for the Anglo-American oligarchy is what might fairly be called the "New Hitler Project."
In 1932-33, British and allied Wall Street financiers poured millions of dollars into the Nazi Party coffers, to literally raise Hitler's party from the dead. Their goal was to Hitlerize and rearm Germany, and provoke a geopolitical war between the Third Reich and the Soviet Unionto prevent any German alliance with a United States under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as had been the explicit policy of the German Friedrich List Society.
The same lunatic faction within the Anglo-American oligarchy is today seeking to provoke a new geopolitical war, as a way out of the financial collapse of their post-Bretton Woods System. This geopolitical war is the "Clash of Civilizations," and the presently designated "New Hitler" is Israel's Jabotinskyite regime under Ariel Sharon.
As Lyndon LaRouche warned, in his Rome address on July 3, following President George W. Bush's disastrous Rose Garden speech of June 24, Ariel Sharon was unleashed to provoke a new Middle East war, which would serve as a flashpoint for precisely the "Clash of Civilizations" war on Islam, prescribed by Britain's senior Orientalist Dr. Bernard Lewis and his epigone Samuel P. Huntington.
On June 30, Wall Street berserker Lawrence Kudlow penned a Washington Times op ed in which he spilled the beans on the plans of the utopian war party in Washington. "Decisive shock therapy to revive the American spirit would surely come with a U.S. invasion of Iraq," he ranted. "The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple thousand points."
A moment of truth has arrived. The option of muddling through the financial turmoil has been taken off the table. Either world leaders step forward to openly embrace Lyndon LaRouche's call for the revival of the FDR American System solution to the end of the present monetary system, or an increasingly insane Anglo-American financial oligarchy will go for hyperinflation and war. The post-post Bretton Woods System is about to come into existence, and it will either be a LaRouche-centered revival of the best features of the original 1944 Bretton Woods System, leading to an era of potential unprecedented global peace and prosperity; or the world will plunge into a New Dark Age, lasting many generations.
|